I helped a friend yesterday upgrade her laptop from Vista x86 to 7 x64.

Everything is working except the webcam which is simply listed as an unknown device.

Win 7 compatibility report identified the device correctly before the upgrade and said it was compatible. I have a combined x86/x64 bit driver installation pacakge from Samsung's website. You have to use the setup.exe file for the installtion though (using right click and install on the ini file gives an error saying this method of installation cannot be used).

The problem seems to be that Windows 7 identifies the device incorrectly as an unknown USB Host Controller. Installing the device driver seems to work but the device doesn't pick up the driver.

Uninstalling the device in device manager and telling it to find the correct driver doesn't work (still thinks it is a host controller) and pointing the driver update to the correct driver folderr manually doesn't work (says no compatible hardware).

Anyone have any idea how to tell Windows 7 x64 to ignore its identification and install it as the device I choose? You used to be able to do this in earlier versions of Windows but I can't seem to see how you can in 64-bit windows.

I have effectively done that any way by installing the drivers, uninstalling the unknown device and then rebooting should allow the camera to pick up the correct driver. Unfortunately it still makes a wrong selection for device type.

The explanation could possibly lie in the fact that the Windows 7 GUI was based on an AI design research project called FAKIR, from PARC (the Palo Alto Research Centre in Madras).The FAKIR AI contains all of the text from Deepak Chopra's:

When there is a system problem, FAKIR's subroutine MANTRA kicks into action and cycles the entire text of these two books iteratively through RAM until the system believes itself to be fixed. Windows 7 is thus a self-healing AI system.